Obama: I’m not underplaying terror threats

President Barack Obama on Wednesday fiercely defended his unwavering commitment to battling the Islamic State – a position he keeps finding himself in, this time because of a baseball game.

Images of Obama doing the wave at a historic ballgame in Cuba with Raul Castro as the death toll mounted on Tuesday from deadly bombings in Brussels did not sit well with some.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday evening that Obama should head back to Washington, “where a #POTUS, under a serious emergency belongs!”

Ted Cruz and John Kasich also pounced on the optics, scolding the commander in chief, and calling on him to focus on his duty to keep Americans safe.

But Obama has been steadfast in his view that ripping up schedules gives the terrorists what they want. He’s said it before, and he said it again on Wednesday in a joint press conference in Buenos Aires with Argentine President Mauricio Macri: Groups like ISIL, which claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Belgian capital that killed at least 31, “are not an existential threat to us.”

Even as he called combating Islamic State his “No. 1 priority,” Obama said their “primary power … is to strike fear in our societies, to disrupt our societies so that the effect cascades from an explosion or an attack by a semiautomatic rifle.”

President Barack Obama on Wednesday fiercely defended his unwavering commitment to battling the Islamic State – a position he keeps finding himself in, this time because of a baseball game.

Images of Obama doing the wave at a historic ballgame in Cuba with Raul Castro as the death toll mounted on Tuesday from deadly bombings in Brussels did not sit well with some.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday evening that Obama should head back to Washington, “where a #POTUS, under a serious emergency belongs!”

Ted Cruz and John Kasich also pounced on the optics, scolding the commander in chief, and calling on him to focus on his duty to keep Americans safe.

But Obama has been steadfast in his view that ripping up schedules gives the terrorists what they want. He’s said it before, and he said it again on Wednesday in a joint press conference in Buenos Aires with Argentine President Mauricio Macri: Groups like ISIL, which claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Belgian capital that killed at least 31, “are not an existential threat to us.”

Even as he called combating Islamic State his “No. 1 priority,” Obama said their “primary power … is to strike fear in our societies, to disrupt our societies so that the effect cascades from an explosion or an attack by a semiautomatic rifle.”

That’s Obama’s rationale for sticking to his agenda. Sometimes, that’s meant keeping the focus on the parts of the world where he thinks American influence can have a lasting, positive impact, like when he jetted off to Asia the day after the deadly Paris attacks in November. Other times, it’s just looked awkward. Obama himself said he regretted the image – though not the act – of him hitting the links on Martha’s Vineyard right after publicly mourning the beheading of the journalist James Foley at the hands of ISIL in 2014.

“I should’ve anticipated the optics,” he said a few weeks later. Now he is anticipating them, and is more ready with a response.

Echoing a point he made to ESPN during the baseball game on Tuesday, Obama cast America’s pastime as a powerful retort to terrorists.

“One of my proudest moments as president was watching Boston” after the marathon bombing, Obama told reporters on Wednesday. “A few days later, folks were out shopping. A few days later, people were in that baseball stadium and singing the national anthem and Big Papi was saying what he felt about Boston, Boston strong, and how a terrorist attack was not going to change the basic spirit of that city.”

Obama said terrorists would ultimately be defeated “in part because we’re going after them and taking strikes against them and arresting them and getting intelligence on them and cooperating with other countries” but also because the U.S. is sending the message: “You do not have power over us.”

Obama, however, is still struggling to overcome the perception that he doesn’t take the Islamic State threat seriously. As Nicolle Wallace, a former communications adviser to President George W. Bush, pointed out, old images die hard. Bush, she told MSNBC, “never recovered from the optics of the morning of Sept. 11 when he stayed in the classroom.”

Obama has tried to overcome his own “classroom” moments and his at-times, less-than-articulate comments about the Islamic State, like when he referred to the terrorist network as the “J.V. team” in early 2014.

“I understand when we see the sight of these kinds of attacks, our hearts bleed because we know that could be our children or that could be our family members or our friends or coworkers who travel to a place like Brussels,” Obama said on Wednesday. “I understand why this is the top priority of the American people, and I want them to understand this is my top priority as well.”

Obama reiterated that he would “not hesitate to use military force where necessary.” But he shot back at Republican presidential candidates who’ve called for more aggressive shows of force. Obama even specifically invoked Cruz, who has said he would carpet bomb ISIL strongholds and on Tuesday called for surveillance of “Muslim neighborhoods” and a halt on immigrants fleeing nations with ties to terrorism.

“As far as the notion of having surveillance of neighborhoods where Muslims are present, I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance, which, by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America, the land of the free,” Obama said Wednesday. “The notion that we would start down that slippery slope makes absolutely no sense,” he said. “It’s contrary to who we are, and it’s not going to help us defeat ISIL.”

Obama added, “When I hear somebody saying we should carpet bomb Iraq or Syria, not only is that inhumane, not only is that contrary to our values, but that would likely be an extraordinary mechanism for ISIL to recruit more people willing to die and explode bombs in an airport or in a metro station. That’s not a smart strategy.”

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Veritas-Semper

Yada, yada, yada… but think, it could have been worse.

Obama could have gone to play a round of golf with Raul (that’s a very old socialist game with strong class traditions, btw), or simply kept on puffing on Cuban cigars between taking questions from reporters following him around Havana.

So, in comparison, relaxing at a baseball game in Havana, wasn’t really so bad taking in the news from Brussels…